Dreamworld
by silent-voices
Summary: In the underworld, something is stirring.
1. Conception

Chapter one: Conception

The walls, rock and bone and dampness, are hung with thick black drapes that absorb every sound. In every part of Dis someone is screaming – because they feel too much or because they do not feel at all anymore. In this deepest, blackest part of Hades' realm, the sounds of the helpless souls of what were once the living are shut out.

The gates are open. She cannot remember a time when they were not: somewhere, someone is sleeping, always. Her brothers and sisters walk around solemnly with feet that barely touch the ground, their faces drawn and pale. She has never spoken to them. They were born in the darkness of their mother's distant love with unseeing eyes. Their father thought it unwise to give them voices.

Morpheus is sleeping though he doesn't breathe. It looks as though he's been dead from the moment he was born. The poppies around his bed ripple in a non-existent wind and cast a ghostly red glow on his face as if they're burning from within. The blood of the dead dripping from his skull.

No sound, except the soft whispers of her siblings leaving the gates and coming back. The ones coming back through the golden gate carry the smells of sweat and the remnants of screams – while she cannot hear, she feels.

She herself has not been given a name. Nyx's daughters are as numerous as her sparkling jewels adorning the sky. Hypnos, having filled every crease of his wife's black wedding gown with his seed and sinking back into his stupor, didn't think it necessary to give their children names. Nyx shook her lover from the wide spread of her limbs and named Morpheus, Phobetor and Phantasos herself. The rest she judged unimportant. She covers her children with her darkness, that is concealing yet cold and blind. Nyx was never the motherly type.

Her daughters have no task but to serve their brother. Yet, Morpheus needs no servants, is sustained by the influx of dreams that refill him on their way back through the gates. His face is constantly cloaked in the mist of the _oneiroi_, tinged red with poppy's light. He shapes all humans in every dream. His body might be on his bed, but his conscience is divided over all of the earth – telling Hero that Leander has died, spurring Aeneas into action and away from Dido, visiting Aphrodite as Adonis from the grave. His sisters linger around his bed, trying to touch his face all of their lives. They know he must not wake; but there is nothing they could do that would stop that from happening. The poppies burn their wispy hands.

They don't sleep themselves, the ultimate proof of their father's indifference.

It is one night, or it is one day – the difference doesn't exist in Dis – that Nyx's daughter burns her fingers on the poppies and feels something dissolve inside of her. Like a flame that eats her up. She pulls away from her brother, who sleeps like he always does, and moves with whispering feet to the gates, where her other, nameless brothers take themselves to the outside world. Morpheus sends them; they change shapes to fit in the humans' heads.

In Nyx's darkness, there is barely anything to see, but a strange desire seizes her daughter standing there by the horn gate. It shakes her. She has never felt anything before (only the remnants of the screams clinging to the dreams' seams).

She wants to fly.


	2. Embryonic Stage

Chapter two: Embryonic Stage

There are ways that lead away from Hades to the outside world.

The main entrance of Dis is underwater, a dark hole lying seemingly asleep on the bottom of Lake Avernus with its calm waters that lap contently at the sandy edges. The women of Cumae come to wash their tunics and slip their heated bodies into the water during the hottest hours of the day. They wash each other's hair and talk about their husbands' habits. The children play further up on the beach: the boys with improvised swords that are really sticks and the girls collecting flowers to weave into their hair.

Whenever a woman – or worse: a child – goes too far into the water, the rest of the group urgently call them back. Where the water of Avernus changes from a friendly blue to a silent, menacing black, the dead need to pass. It's dangerous to disturb them – they still have the strength to pull and make someone drown. The nursing mothers press their babies closer to their breasts and shiver.

They will all pass here some day.

- - -

The ghosts that dip into the water, having died on the field or in their sleep or during battle or by the cruel hand of a murderer, look like men but aren't. They carry every wrinkle, every wound that their mortal bodies carried, but they are nothing but smoke – smoke and consciousness. The dead still have desires, although they have no sensors anymore that could fulfil those, and they still love, although they have no limbs anymore that could make them touch. They are still hungry and thirsty but they glide through whatever food is presented to them without tasting it. The new arrivals cry out in frustration and pain at this eternal injustice. As time passes, as time loses its meaning, most spirits grow silent and immobile, sticking to the walls of Hades like stone. Their ghostly heart still does an impression of beating.

There comes a time for judgment. By then, most spirits have started to forget what their own faces looked like, although they can still vividly remember those of their loved ones. Their only desire is now the draught of Lethe and floating away on its blissful unawareness. Most of them will never be judged so favourably, and those who do don't remember how badly they wanted it before.

Hades does have a sense of humour now and then.

The spirits never try to pass in the opposite direction than the one they came in: through Avernus back to the outside, where the sun bounces off ripening grain and women's bodies. There are ways but they only seem to work in one direction.

Nyx's daughter, who cannot be classified as a spirit but who has never seen the world of the living either, doesn't remember how she knows this. Maybe it's what her mother whispered to her pregnant abdomen before her children fell down to earth – "Dis is the end of a road with no way back" – or maybe the master of the underworld himself has planted this knowledge in the minds of all those residing underground.

It's startling, to say the least, to discover that she knows things; before, she only knew the gates and Morpheus and the death and life of the poppies. But inside of her, things are stirring, old things that were always there but are maybe changing now. It's not something _natural_ and she doubts that this is _normal_ but standing by the horn gate, she only sees the way out of Hades. Her brothers, silent with mouths that don't work, pass her by and don't look at her. She wonders why they always come back.

Nyx's daughter tries to find her voice.

What she's doing she does not know; her mouth has never been open before, but now the lips part to show only blackness. She feels something between her head and her shoulders, as if her mind is falling down from between her ears. A tremble. A shocking pain.

She grabs the black curtains that line the walls with smoky hands and into them, she coughs once. Her throat sings with pain and something else.

For the first time since Morpheus was born out of the darkness of the night into the darkness of sleep, a sound is made in his bedroom.

- - -

Something is going wrong.

Hades had been asleep, his face pressed into the empty space where Persephone lies in another time of year – not now – when a strange tremor makes him wake utterly and completely. His sleep, instead of rolling back like a slow curtain, seems to have left him instantaneously and wholly.

He gets up. Dis is dark as it always is, cold as it always is. He hears the soft lamenting of souls that are waiting for the judges. Nothing seems to be different, but something is.

He goes to search for Charon and finds the old eyeless boatman crouching in his rotting boat, fingers trailing over the edges and reaching for Acheron's waters. The river is restless and seems to push up to lap at the boatman's fingers. There are no souls waiting on the other side; Hades supposes Hermes has just left to collect the new arrivals.

"You know it is unwise to touch the water," Hades says to Charon's back. "Styx only carries you because you leave her alone."

Charon straightens, does not turn. He could never face Hades anyway, without eyes. "I know Styx like no one does," he says slowly, but pulls his arm back in.

"No. Styx knows you. Don't confuse the two, Charon. Styx was here long before you were."

There is a silence between the master of the dead and the carrier of the dead. Hades knows Charon is thinking of the times when souls needed to swim over Styx to reach Dis. The ferryman shifts, making his tiny boat wobble on the waves.

"Is there anything I can do to be of service, sir?" he says, face still averted.

"Yes. I need you to send Hermes to fetch me Hypnos."

Charon jerks. A splash of water rolls into his boat. "Have Hypnos come… here?" Charon asks, and Hades feels the growing discomfort of the old soul.

He knows why, but doesn't reassure the boatman like he usually would. "Yes. Here."

The god of the dead swoops away, feeling fear start to worry at the edges of his mind.


	3. Foetal Stage

Chapter three: Foetal Stage

The thing about gods is that their belief in their own omnipotence is blinding. Zeus is truly the master of the universe, with enough power to change everything, to destroy everything, to preserve everything. It's his indulgence in human-like pleasures that cripple him. The gods up on Olympos have not been shaped to dislike or love one another – they are pure essence of being, with only purpose: fulfilling their duty. They have infinite choice though, and they chose to be the way they are. They chose to be less than what they could have been. Or was it decided for them as well, ultimately? The fact remains that they refuse to see their own short-comings. They play with the humans, infuse them with insanity or hatred or lust or a short-lived winning streak and laugh themselves silly before meeting the exact same fate.

The humans below look to their gods for guidance, but instead find only fickle favouritism. Man expects his gods to be better than their creations, but is often severely let down. Even the gods fall into the traps of excess, cruelty and inherent humanity. This great lapsus in the nature of deity has led humans to theorise that it is humans who created gods instead of the other way around. Humans try to create something bigger than themselves only to find that no such thing is possible. Humanity is already at its biggest. "In the faults of humanity its strength lies." Who will tell?

Other than what he thinks, Zeus doesn't control everyone on earth and on Olympos.

- - -

Hermes finds Hypnos between sleep and waking, which is how one usually finds Hypnos. The old god never truly sleeps, ironically. Instead he spends his eternal days growing continually older, dreaming dreams infused with reality. He has a constant, but not very watchful eyes on his children. He mostly thinks about Nyx and wills her dark night to come and cover him. She refuses, though. Maybe she's ashamed of her double relationship to him: mother and lover both. In the absence of sun and the absence of night, Hypnos gets caught in a strange web of unnatural darkness that clings to the walls of his palace-cave and his face, his limbs, his old heart. It binds him down.

He is eternally tired.

The Olympic gods try to leave Hypnos alone for the most part. They're not directly related to him and he hails from a different time, a time in which Olympos hadn't yet begun to grow and there were creatures that are now caught in the earth's core (and sometimes try to escape through the mountains of fire). Zeus and his siblings hadn't been born yet, the world was one heap of debris ruled by giants and the measure of life was death. One thing that hasn't changed, perhaps. However the case, Hypnos is rarely seen outside of his dark dwelling. It's said he comes out on starless nights to gaze at his wife without her seeing him, but no one has ever actually seen this happen. Nyx, untouchable unreachable woman is indifferent to his devotion – despite the fact that they work together closely in a way.

Hermes feels closest to Hypnos of all Olympic gods. This is because of one silly detail: they both carry wings in places that shouldn't have wings – Hermes' feet, Hypnos' head. Hermes wishes he could ask Hypnos if he ever goes out to fly on moonless evenings to try and reach Nyx's heart, but he dares not. However sluggish and ancient the god of sleep may seem, Hermes knows what torture sleep or the lack of it can bring.

As it is, he's been sent by Hades. This makes him uncomfortable in many ways, most of which relate to the troubled ways that link sleep to death. He is most afraid that he will make a fatal mistake in Hypnos' dim cave and mistake his twin half-brother Thanatos for the old sleeper. Thanatos is more concisely described than Hypnos: he brings swift death for all those who look upon him. And unlike many other deities, he has little patience for the excuse and imaginary protection of immortality. Hermes has tried, and failed, to understand the complicated relationship Hades has to Thanatos – both masters of death, but ready to kill each other as soon as setting eyes on one another. Hermes has yet to figure out whether death is a sign of animosity amongst death lords or a sign of respect. It confuses him to no extent to imagine Hades as one of the souls he reigns over. These morbid thoughts only enter him as he guides the dead to Charon's boat or if he has other dark errands to run, like this one. In the sun up on Olympos he feels nothing short of untouchable by death.

The fact that Hypnos is in his bed makes him more easy to set apart from his twin, who would be brooding in a dark corner of the cave. Feeling relief too intense to describe, Hermes approaches the dark bed of feathers and the still, scarcely breathing form of the sleep lord.

"Hypnos," he speaks, trying to make his voice sound stable. The god doesn't stir.

"Hypnos, Hades sends me," Hermes says loud and clear. Deeper down the cave, he hears the shuffle of a body moving and suppose Thanatos is watching him from the shadows. Suppressing the powerful urge to turn around and run, Hermes leans a little closer to Hypnos' slumbering form and repeats: "Hades sends me."

With a jolt, the old god is awake and on his feet. For a moment, his eyes shine crazily in the gloom, but then Hermes can see fatigue already slipping back in and the eyelids start to droop again.

"Hades," Hypnos rumbles in a voice cracked by disuse. It's not a question, more like an unbelieving statement.

"Yes. He wants to see you. He said you don't need to cross Styx – he will. He wants to talk on the banks."

A great sigh escapes the weary god. "Good. I hate Styx. Tell him… I'll come. But I need to do something first."

Eager to get away, Hermes agrees and rushes off.

- - -

Crossing Styx makes even the lord of the underworld uncomfortable. The water, indifferent to who is in the boat, tries to make the boatman lose control. It has never succeeded, but to those being ferried it always seems as if it will this time. Dark and full of desire of dark things, the water pulls at the boat.

"Be careful, Charon," Hades commands. Charon is smiling.

On the other side, Hermes is waiting with a new batch of souls, newly dead and still crying at the loss of warmth and feeling. The winged messenger is pale like his dead companions, and Hades guesses that has a lot to do with Hypnos standing next to him, giant compared to the small, lithe Hermes, spreading something dark in the air that is not like anything found in Dis. His eyes are closed, but his body is tense and Hades knows he's listening intently.

The boat bumps the bank of Styx gently and Hades gathers himself. He stands aside to allow the new arrivals to take their places and pay Charon his fee. All of them are crying and trying to touch him. He shrinks away from their ghostly hands, even though they have no power to touch him anymore, and doesn't say anything to them.

Charon and Hermes take off. Hades is suddenly alone on the black sand with Hypnos.

"Speak, Hades," Hypnos says, opening one eye.

"Something has happened to Morpheus," Hades replies immediately.

Hypnos is silent, then says: "That's not true. I would have felt it."

"I haven't been dreaming for five nights now. Persephone sent message from above that the animals are running around all night and day. Up on the land the humans are endlessly sacrificing to restore their sleep to them. They've started sacrificing their newborns. They think they've angered you."

"I would have felt it," Hypnos re-states.

"Hypnos," Hades says and lets the name fall like a coin into a wishing well. The old god opens his eyes and looks at the death lord. "I think your son has woken up."

There's a silence in which the panic inside Hypnos' brain grows. "But it can't be; I haven't felt it."

"Something has happened and I think that's it."

"I've still been dreaming," Hypnos says. "If I'm still dreaming, that means Morpheus is still asleep."

"No one is dreaming."

Hypnos shakes his big head. "It's something else, Hades. Why don't you go see what's happened? This is your kingdom. You know I don't have the power to enter here."

"I don't have the power to enter there either, Hypnos. The poppies would kill me instantly."

Hypnos' eyes are falling shut again. "What do I do?"

"Talk to Nyx."

The wail that leaves the old sleep god's mouth makes all of Dis tremble.

- - -

It's time for a name, she's decided. She's been a faceless, nameless wisp of smoke for too long.

Around her her brothers and sisters are running around haphazardly, aimlessly. The gates have been shut, though no one knows why. She thinks she might know though.

Morpheus is still sleeping but he's started to move. The poppies have started to wilt. No one knows what to do.

Time for a name.

_Orienta_.


	4. Birth

**Chapter 4: birth**

Nyx carries her body as if she was not _it, _but rather _in it_; she spins her limbs like clothing from pole to pole. Appearing in people's dreams she is a young woman with hair like snow and eyes like embers – in reality she is the darkness that shuts their eyes with long fingers. She slips between the covers as lovers begin to court, she flits between the temples as darkness falls, she kisses the branches of the trees goodnight. Scratching at the people's walls she penetrates their hearts and makes them catch their breath. The men go home to kiss their wives. The children are plagued by shadows. She rests her tired feet on the brows of sleepers, between their eyes so that they wouldn't see her even if they were startled to awareness. She pulls and pushes and screams in the hollows of everyone's mind. She makes the holes in a man's skull through which his dreams enter. She's like a dream. She's like a woman. In reality, she is nothing but a breathy confession of fleeting love in a sleepy ear. This before the dark of the mind rushes up to conceal the damage Nyx's invasion has done. Humans are good at deceiving themselves.

She remembers giving birth to Hypnos. Not wholly, not in the sense that she can see it happening again before her mind's eye, but she feels the eternal pull of her delta that longs for him, both as a lover and as a child. Even in her womb he was her lover, exploring his maternal home – her body – with his hands. He sent her dreams coloured a vivid red. He has no father. His father is Nyx's loneliness, her determination. He is her thoughts turned to flesh.

When the race of men looks up to the sky it feels humbled, brought to greatness, dazzled, superior, confused or happy. Nyx infects the mortals with her passing fancies. She inspires poets and warriors alike. Yet the throbbing heart of her desire, the opening of her birth canal out onto the earth, her woman's delta is felt by all, no matter how shamefully Nyx tries to disguise her lust. Children are born on the nights when she wants Hypnos. The shimmering of the night just _there_, a moist fog that rests on the cheekbones of humans – it makes warmth grow in maiden's laps and phalli spring to attention.

She wants Hypnos back in her womb, but she can never let it happen again. The one time she gave in she opened the gates of the world to creatures without directions or mouths. Hypnos was undisturbed, found it unnecessary to name their ghostly children and just want more of her. Annoyed, she swatted him away but regretted it ever since. She named three of their sons and let the rest wander in silent gloom, willing them to be – if not happy – then apathetic.

Hypnos still knows how to make her come to him, because he wants the same things. He was part of her in every way. She tries to resist the pull of his nightly fire, his incense. He's set sprigs of rosemary to fire, he's grinding thyme with his teeth. Heavy fumes curl around his shoulders. His fire shines as bright as Apollo's chariot – instead of scaring her away it only attracts her more and he knows this. In the cave, Thanatos, the other brother, shrinks away from the flickering light. He is always stealing the light from living eyes; he cannot bear to see fire eating away at the air without a human spirit attached to it. Hypnos sends his twin away with a half-lidded glare.

Nyx doesn't remember giving birth to Thanatos – he was already dead as she pushed him out of her and into the darkness, a slick bundle of being that had no purpose but to steal the life of others and use it up to keep himself alive.

As it is, she cannot bear to see the glow of Hypnos' cave and not enter. She knows why he wants her to come and she thinks it might be a good way to meet him again. She gathers her wispy limbs and wills them to be solid. All around the earth, night's darkness retreats to give way to a grey, silent hush that sticks to the faces of the sleeping men and slips into their bodies through their open mouths. Their dreams would turn sour if they were having any. Uneasily, she thinks of their dreams that don't exist anymore and remembers why she's here.

She enters the cave, dousing the flame immediately. The darkness is startlingly full, rich with the smell of burned rosemary. She feels Hypnos slipping into a hazy pleasurable stupor before he pulls himself together and forces his eyes open. Nyx presses against his eyelids. She's close to him again and feels remarkably heavy, for all of her fleetingness.

"Please," he says, and she knows he means to ask her to pull away from his body. He can't say it, but she feels his desperate resolve to not touch her.

So she does, body and mind aching, and retreats to the form she takes when in dreams, hair wet and shockingly white. Almost carefully, the fire flickers back to life.

"Thank you," he breathes. He doesn't need to open his eyes to see her as she is.

She can hear his twin shuffling his feet further down the cave and feels a strange twinge of remembrance – but quickly disregards it. She looks at her son, at her husband and sees how he is tall and timeless yet old. His face seems to be falling downwards endlessly as his eyes fall shut. He is exquisitely beautiful in his slowness and she remembers why she loves him, why she _loved_ him even more than she does now.

He says to her: "It's on Hades' command that I summoned you."

"I know."

"I know you don't need to hear my questions, because you already know them. I would like to ask you to let me speak them anyway. I would not know which of your answers goes with which question."

She is silent.

"How well do you know your children?"

She hadn't expected this question to be first. "Not at all. They are like strangers to me. They fell from me the minute they were born." A pause. "And you know this, since you were there."

He doesn't take up on the challenge in her tone and says instead: "What has happened to Morpheus?"

"Nothing has," she answers truthfully.

"Something must have. Hades said he hasn't been dreaming. Neither have the mortals. They're sacrificing their children to appease me."

"Only you aren't so easily appeased?" she bites, annoyed by the way he's keeping his voice soft and flat. As if he's trying not to startle her.

"That has nothing to do with it."

"Tell me I'm wrong," she challenges, remembering his utter nonchalance towards their children – not even granting his unnamed daughters the wellness of sleep. Mortals murdering their children doesn't bother Hypnos.

"You are not wrong. You are just irrelevant."

A pause. She feels his realisation hit him – he had meant to say _it_, "it is irrelevant" not "you are", but he had said you, and now he couldn't unsay it. The words hang between them, trembling in the incense.

She remembers why she hates him, why she _hates_ him more than she used to.

"Forgive me," he whispers, eyes shut tightly.

She says nothing, tells him that she will not by _not_ telling him that she will not.

"I need you to answer more questions. After that, you may hate me and stay away from me and scoff at my love for you and question my remorse."

"I know what kind of answers you're looking for, Hypnos, and I cannot give them to you."

"If not you, then who?"

There is no answer to that question either.

"Nyx. Mother. What is happening to us?"

She gathers her body around herself and says: "We made the mistake to forget that the power to create does not equal the power to control. It's something we have learned before and forgot before. It's something the younger gods are yet to learn." She's thinking of Zeus on his throne. She knows how deep a fall from Mount Olympos goes.

"What does it mean?"

"It means that we thought that unnamed things do not exist – but unnamed things can make themselves exist, because they are not defined yet. Things without a name are free to fester and thrive and change form. We thought we dropped our children like empty shells to earth. What we did was drop them to earth without an identity. Now they're making one for themselves."

"Our unnamed children?" He seems startled, as if he doesn't remember them.

"We should have named them, Hypnos," she says and wishes it wasn't already too late.

"Our daughters? Those soulless pieces of… of fabric? How could we have named them?"

"You judge them as if they were dead. They're alive, Hypnos, even if they skulk in constant shadows."

"They had no purpose."

"Because we never gave them one." She's angry with him for not understanding; does his father's heart beat not as loudly as her mother's heart? She has forgotten she has children more than once, but now she knows she has an enormous guilt that's being placed on her shoulders. "The truth is," she continues, "that one of them has woken up. She's given herself a name. Orienta. She's closed the gates. That's why nobody's dreaming."

The fire hisses and sputters, then dies.

- - -

On the other sides of the horn gate and gold gate, her brothers that were shut out are weakly trying to make their presence known by pounding on the doors. Inside Morpheus is trashing on his bed, the mist of the _oneiroi_ so thick on his pale face that he cannot stay still. He doesn't need to breathe, but it still seems like he's suffocating. Her dream brothers are bounding around, hitting the walls and falling back again, trying to break through the closed gates. Their energy is as endless as their despair.

Orienta's thinking. She doesn't know the way in Dis. She's only ever seen this room.

The only way out might be those gates.

She's closed them once, so she can open them as well.

She goes to the horn gate and puts her wispy hand on its frame. Gathering the strange new strength in her throat, she opens her mouth and lets out a long, shrill scream that shakes the ceiling.

The chaos is complete. The gates, that had fallen shut with a resounding _clang_ when she had first made a sound, swing open with such force that the golden gate falls out of its casing. Immediately, the hordes of captured _oneiroi_ take flight, drawn irrevocably to the minds of sleepers.

She catches one of her brothers on his swift way out and rapidly hooks her arms around his neck. Still screaming at the top of her new-found lungs, she's carried with an amazing speed up, up up up

to the above world.


	5. Infancy

Chapter 5: Infancy

**Chapter 5: Infancy**

The dreams that storm up to the mortals are so strong they fell even the men who are awake and working away in the night. They are dark, hungry with mouths that pull and suck at the exposed brains of sleeping innocence and their numbers are great – more dreams than there are sleepers. Nights of unsatisfying, maddeningly light sleep make way for the kind of sleep that is haunting and dripping with the water of Styx. Children don't wake from their dreams, overpowered by the light and the colours interspersed with the darkness of dreams that have connected at the seams. Closed in, the life squeezed out of their limbs. Mothers, driven by a love deeper than death, try to shake them awake, crying through closed eyes.

The gods have fallen on their beds, if they have even made it there, surprised by a tiredness that weighed down their immortal limbs. They do not die, but they sleep. Their dreams are dark and flashing with teeth and danger ripping itself open. Even the gods.

Death is nothing but a prolonged, unsatisfying sleep and Orienta knows it. She's woken up from a sleep that was never fully there. Now she's awake, the absence of sleep leaves a lot of time for thinking. Thinking about sleep, about death, she tastes the irony on her tongue. Dimly the memories of her Before-Life filter through her thoughts. Her Before-Life was barely a life, wandering in the eternal gloom with a mouth that had no use. She couldn't speak, she had nothing to say because she was nothing. She was a shadow, flitting from one corner to the other. Now something has forced her to wake and she wants to know what.

The earth is white under a sky of coal. The moon stands in full orbit, quiet and unmoving in a trembling sky. The star signs are on the move – Orion is dipping over the horizon, his dogs on the loose, Perseus moves closer to Andromeda when her mother isn't looking. It's wrong to think the sky is unchangeable. When the humans close their eyes the stars begin their life, to the puzzlement of the laws of life that have been invented to make things easier. The sun doesn't rise. Apollo has fallen asleep on the cloudy floor of his sky-bound castle – in the stalls his sun horses dream of reigns and masters with whips in nights full of blood.

There's no one awake save Orienta. (or is that just what she thinks?) Her brothers have felled every single living being with their heavy dream limbs – hugged them, put them into a sleep thick as blood if not killed them. Who ever knew that sleep could kill? Hypnos maybe, her father, who did not love her enough to hate her enough to name her. Who did not see her eyes as he plunged her into a sleepless lifeless existence.

How does she know he exists? She just does, looking up to the sky. Ouranos is stirring, the ancient god that has been sleeping and silent for era's. The star signs hurry across the sky, their careful orbit lost. The ones that are usually asleep have woken in this eternal night.

Is it wrong for her to enjoy this? Sensation is seeping into her, travelling up from her feet to her head. The worldly air slaps her in the face, a face she didn't know she had until a still pool of water threw it at her. Startled, she had hit it with her fists – discovering her fingers, her throbbing veins, that she was solid – and it had shattered, then came back into focus. She's white as the earth, her eyes dark and deep in her face. She's something that exists. Exists. _Exists _what does it mean? She tastes the word. _Exist_. Her parents have denied her the word and she has gone on to obtain it for herself. The umbilical cord fully cut now – no longer a soulless echo of her father's resounding orgasm. She might still be his seed, but she has come to life.

Is it wrong for her to enjoy this? Her dream brothers are as mute and creeping as ever, attacking every fibre that still stirs with visions that pretend to be prophecies (and never are). Her sisters are still caught in their nightly, dimmed existence where no light ever reaches their eyes. Do they have eyes? She has never seen them, which might mean she had no eyes either. They fell from their mother's womb unformed – not even _deformed_, even that was too good for them – and they have never found to strength to form themselves.

She has.

Why?

It's wrong for her to enjoy this because she's alone in a take-over that should have been done by all of them. All of them, together, an army of seeing eyes and new-found mouths. Risen from a death-like sleep.

Even as she thinks it, she also thinks: _no._

This is her triumph, this is her night. Her voice has driven parents to sacrifice their children. Her voice has opened the gates so dreams of death could flood the lands. This sensation is hers by right.

No one is awake save Orienta, Hypnos and Nyx. Hypnos, who ironically never sleeps and Nyx, who is only the vessel of sleep.

Hypnos: She robs me of every ounce of strength I have.

Nyx: That's because you are built out of sleep.

Hypnos: I am also built out of will.

Nyx: You forget she has your will as well. And mine.

Hypnos: You're proud of her.

Nyx: I'm proud of how she makes me hurt.

The two old lovers, the night and the sleep, the mother and the child try to catch their breath in a world that needs them everywhere, on everything, at the same time. There is no breath left.


End file.
